A Fallcious Response

If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me, "How's it going?" or a question of equally deep existential import, I would probably be an incredibly wealthy person. People ask you this question every day, sometimes several times. Sometimes several times by the same person.

If I had half a million dollars for every time someone asked me what I thought of the metaphysical theories of George Berkeley outside of a classroom setting, I might actually have a million dollars. And that's only because I hang out with the same pretentious people who already know how you're going to answer the questions.

The question, is not the meaning of all the phenomenlogical rubbish that Berkeley spouted, but about conversations and human interaction. When someone asks how you are doing, they don't really care. It's an obligatory question that you ask everyone. In fact, as it turns out, the more you get to know someone, and the more you begin to care about 'how they are doing,' the less frequently you ask this obligatory question and have to hear the obligatory, response, usually something along the lines of 'not bad,' or 'pretty good,' or some such thing.

When I ask you, "How are you?" I don't necessarily care what the answer is. It's just a conversational convention. We all do it, and we do it without even thinking. A good definition of 'chit chat,' would be conversation with the purpose of filling meaningless empty time with something even more empty and meaningless. The same goes for such things as 'small talk,' 'pleasantries,' and 'gossip.' It's all the same thing, designed to cheapen our most effective means of conveying information, verbal speech.

Now, of course I'm being melodramatic about the whole thing. I am as guilty as anyone of engaging in pointless conversation, and even enjoying it from time to time. Exchanging jokes is perhaps one of the most pleasant ways to pass time. But it seems to me, that sometimes it's all we do. We talk about the movies we watched, what was on television last night, sports, or heaven forbid, the weather! It's not very often, that we talk about things in a meaningful way, or a way that is emotionally, intellectually fullfilling.

When people do get caught up some sort of debate, a deep philosophical conversation, one of two things will happen: 9 times out of 10, it will get uncomfortable and someone will change the subject; and all the other times it will become a heated argument and more than one ego will get bruised. Very rarely do we engage someone in conversation with the intent of learning from them. We all are so very sure that we're right about everything that we refuse to take into account the consideration that we are wrong.

I am guilty of this as well, however, I have a different problem: I am always right, and no one seems to believe me.

So this is the problem, more or less, with verbal communication. It's either pointless, boring, or trivial. And if it's not one of those three, it's invariably not going to be productive anyway.

The solution? You'd like that wouldn't you. Well, let me tell you. There is an answer to this question, but you're not going to like it. Despite that fact, we humans evolved as problem solvers, despite the fact that every modern convenience we possess is the direct result of a simple algorithm (find a problem, figure out a solution to it, implement that solution), there is no solution to this problem. It is fundamentally built into us. People will never be able to fully understand each other, and no matter what, we will never, ever, have world peace.

Good night.